The Light of Christmas
The creche as key to the solstice
O Rising Sun, splendor of eternal light and sun of justice: come and illumine those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.1
— Magnificat antiphon, Vespers of 21 Dec
Do not judge anything before the time, until the Lord comes, who will illuminate the hidden things of darkness and manifest the counsels of the heart; and then each thing will receive praise from God.2
— Reading, Vespers of 21 Dec
Even in the age of electric light, winter is dark. The absence of the sun makes itself felt at a deep psychological level, whether or not we pause to give it conscious attention. Our normal relationship with the world around us is tightly bound up with the sense of sight. When the darkness robs us of this capacity we cannot help feeling lost and isolated. The world seems less real, less intelligible, and more threatening. This experience tells us something crucially important about ourselves and our place in the universe, and one of the first tasks of any authentically human culture is to transmit a collective reading of this message, which can thus be expanded and enriched with each passing generation.
For Christians, the feast of Christmas provides the interpretive key. The public prayer of the Catholic Church (the “Liturgy of the Hours”) supplies abundant resources for entering the logic of these symbols during four weeks of preparation. The liturgy of sundown on the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, contains a particularly precious combination of texts, presenting the symbol of sunrise as lived by the people of Israel, and its application to daily life by the rabbi and apostle Paul of Tarsus. As a meditation on primordial cosmic symbols, this prayer is universally accessible, while conveying its own specific content. Each of us carries our own implicit interpretation of the symbol of darkness, and can derive precious fruit from a sincere encounter with the one proposed by the Church.
The first text is addressed to the rising sun (“O Oriens...”). The liturgy of Israel uses the watchman waiting for sunrise as an image of the basic attitude that God expects of his people: “More than sentinels hope for the dawn, let Israel hope in the Lord” (Psalm 129/130). The sentinel knows that the darkness is not permanent, that the landscape is not fundamentally unintelligible and hostile, even though it appears so in the deep of night. The sunrise will reveal the whole rich fabric of reality that was lying hidden the whole time, the beauty of the mountains and the fields. The sentinel is certain, without a shadow of the doubt, that this moment will come. But he cannot do anything to bring it about. And (if the stars are obscured by clouds), he cannot even be sure of how much longer the wait will last. All he can do is wait, in the serene confidence that darkness does not have the last word.
This attitude is elaborated more explicitly in another psalm (138/9), in which the psalmist imagines himself plunging into the heart of darkness, and asking himself — from that position — whether God is still with him: “Or perhaps I would think to bury myself in darkness; night should surround me, friendlier than day.” In many mythological and philosophical traditions, the answer is ambiguous. Maybe some things are just irrational and meaningless. Maybe human beings inhabit an obscure corner of the cosmos that is irrelevant to the larger forces that govern the world. But the psalmist decisively rejects this picture, planting himself firmly in the attitude of hope for the dawn: “but no, darkness is no hiding-place from thee, with thee the night shines clear as day itself; light and dark are one.”
In the second text, St. Paul explains a consequence of this hope in the eternal dawn to the young church at Corinth: natural human judgments of apparently negative situations are radically incomplete. Everything will be illumined, and find its place in the great plan of God. Even those who seem to be agents of evil will in some sense receive “praise” from God himself, because of the part they have played in the larger story. The hope of the rising sun is incompatible with any kind of bitterness, pessimism or fanaticism. It breeds a profound patience, a capacity to squarely face the pain and seek the good that is hidden there. The one who possesses this hope can embrace circumstances and persons that most people shrink from in horror and fear, not in fatalistic resignation to the darkness, but rather with total confidence in the hidden presence of goodness, which will one day become fully manifest.
The Christmas scene is precisely the kind of circumstance that we are tempted to judge “before the time.” An authoritarian ruler who thoughtlessly interrupts the precarious harmony of thousands of lives, in the cold pursuit of enhanced administrative efficiency. A young family that suddenly finds itself homeless on a cold winter night. Childbirth in a cave on the outskirts of town, with a feeding trough for animals as the baby’s first bed. Surely that cave is one place the light cannot reach — a reasonable motive for anger and frustration at the injustice of the world, for scathing editorials against the imperial regime, for debunking the supposed power and goodness of God.
This brings us to the heart of the feast of Christmas, the central claim of the Christmas Gospel: the child lying there in the feeding trough is the light. The light that cannot enter the cave from outside is found emanating from the inside. This child is the dawn, the “Oriens,” the one represented by the rising sun. And with his arrival, all the darkness of life and of history is already illumined.
But receiving this illumination is not an easy task. It is not a matter of reasoning through a syllogism, or of learning some new facts. It entails a radical purification from our own secret preference for the darkness, which provides an excuse for egoism. And it requires a demanding asceticism of interior silence, which renders us capable of seeing beyond immediate appearances. The Christmas feast is an invitation to take up these challenges in earnest, to let our life be transformed by the dawn. The myriad artistic representations of the child in the manger provide an excellent place to get started – just sitting still and looking at the child and his mother, sincerely desiring the light, with all its consequences.
O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol iustitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis.
Nolite ante tempus quidquam iudicare, quoadusque veniat Dominus, qui et illuminabit abscondita tenebrarum et manifestabit consilia cordium; et tunc laus erit unicuique a Deo.